Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Monday August 08, 2011 @11:12AM
from the breakin-da-code dept.

hypnosec noted that Google has stepped up to try to help fundraising for Bletchley Park. From TFA: "The point is that all of us have heroes. At Google our heroes are Alan Turing and the people who worked on breaking the codes at Bletchley Park. It was probably the most inspiring and uplifting achievement in scientific technology over the last hundred years. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that without Alan Turing, Google as we know it wouldn't exist."

They did donate $100K.
FTA: Google already played a crucial role at Bletchley - the company contributed an hefty amount of some $100,000, which was used to assist in securing the papers of Alan Turing- a leading seminal computer scientist and code breaker who worked at the venue.

Probably due to the attitude coming from an Anonymous Coward. Calling $100K "fucking peanuts" is pretty ridiculous -- it's looking a gift horse in the mouth and it's insulting. Google has donate $100K more than any other company with big pockets and they're trying to make a grass roots effort to have the area sustainably supported. Knocking their efforts as "not enough" when as a private company they have ZERO OBLIGATION to do anything at all is displaying a remarkable disrespect for the nature of charit

"peanuts" is relative to what is needed, and what the donor can give, as well as the actual value of the contribution.

For instance, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation intend to create social change. $100K to say, 200 schools would indeed be peanuts because it wouldn't change much of anything.

With Microsoft it's mostly that they can donate any amount they like. After all, they set the price on their software, and it's what they donate. Plus that kind of donation is mostly an investment. I've never heard o

yeah, but he is right, from the perspective of google's accountants, it's barely a drop out of the petty cash. It depends on how you look at it. However, Benchley Park is awesome, especially in the world of cryptography.

gee I hope when I donate less that a microprecent of my income to charity some preacher will be standing behind me touting how I had zero obligation to do anything and how you pissants should be greatful.

the AC does have a point, its like dropping a quarter and a dime in the thing at Mc Donalds

The obligation of a publicly traded company like Google is to create value for its shareholders. If it is able to do some of that by contributing to philanthropic efforts, thats's great, but they should not be spending any significant amount to do that.

The Google billionaires, on the other hand, have the means and (arguably) the moral obligation to do philanthropic work. THEY should be the ones opening their wallets, not the corporation.

So if Google isn't going to make a large donation they shouldn't do anything at all? That thing at McDonald's raised twenty-five million dollars [rmhc.org] in quarters and dimes last year to room and board sick children, just FYI.

While technically correct, the recruitment posters have ra.mod.uk on them, not ba.mod.uk (which doesn't redirect to anything) or army.mod.uk (their actual website). So if they advertising as such, I don't think they mind too much when people get it wrong. Also, a couple of individual sections are called as such, like the Royal Army Medical Corps and the Royal Army Veterinary Corps.

While technically correct, the recruitment posters have ra.mod.uk on them, not ba.mod.uk (which doesn't redirect to anything) or army.mod.uk (their actual website). So if they advertising as such, I don't think they mind too much when people get it wrong. Also, a couple of individual sections are called as such, like the Royal Army Medical Corps and the Royal Army Veterinary Corps.

Well I just pointed my browser to ra.mod.uk and it took me to the website of the Royal Artillery, which is a set of regiments in the Army, not the entire Army.

Those aren't necessarily incompatible. For example, lots of people think Microsoft's best days are behind it, but it still has loads of cash and publicity, so "Microsoft supports charity X" can be useful for charity X.

There's a bit of difference though. As far as I can tell, Microsoft mainly "donates" to charity when it's their software and training that is being given to help further their brand. I may be incorrect in this, but Google isn't donating time and mandating/installing Chrome/ChromeOS on all the PCs in the place or training people how to search efficiently.

IE:Microsoft Donates $344 Million in Software To Worldwide Initiative to Train 400,000 Teachers (...to train their students in Microsoft software)Microsoft donates cash, software to help military vets get IT skills (... to use their software to encourage businesses to buy more)Microsoft Donates $250,000 of Software to Create IT Jobs for Youth in Kenya (... again, for Microsoft's overall benefit)

Heck, software is still a cheap donation. They can put any self-assessed value on it and print off a new copy for a dime a dozen to inflate their charitable donation amount.

Microsoft has a matching program for employee donation. It matches dollar by dollar and even donates $17 per hour if you do volunteer work.
Microsoft also have the Giving Campaign (October in the US). Here different groups compete about raising the most donations (cash). There are fund raising events like breakfast with your Senior VP being your server, or auctions (dinner at home with Bill Gates is typical a top draw ~$50,000).
In 2009 the Giving Campaign raised $70 million (cash) in the US. That is $35 millions from employees (about $500 per employee) and $35 millions from MS.

There are legitimate questions to be asked about how many resources we should spend commemorating/preserving the past, vs. letting the past be past and spending forward; but to the degree that comemmoration/celebration/recognition of the past is a worthwhile enterprise, Bletchley park has always seemed mysteriously neglected.

The work done there was extraordinarily vital in terms of signals intelligence and cryptography, and not having that done would have hampered the Allied war effort significantly. The fact that that work also included some groundbreaking CS and early computing machine work is just icing on the cake. There are other WWII sites with many more casualties; but the only other WWII R&D developments that can even fall in the same order of magnitude are the Manhattan Project, Penicillin mass-production, and possibly Radar(The cavity magnetron: defeated Hitler and produces delicious popcorn in minutes!).

Letting the past keep to itself is a self-consistent position, albeit not one I endorse; but any sort of historical preservation of WWII stuff that doesn't have Bletchley park well up there seems downright ill-formed...

It's been heartening to see the increased recognition the computing pioneers at Bletchley Park have received over the last few years, after being neglected for decades. Gordon Brown's posthumous apology to Alan Turing [nationalarchives.gov.uk] for the persecution he received for his sexuality was a great moment. Most people have never heard of Turing but he deserves recognition. They ought to put his face on a banknote or something. About three years ago when I was at university a guy visited from Bletchley Park to give a talk on th

What I found interesting about the work done is how relevant it is today in security and cryptography. While Enigma had its weaknesses like a letter could never be coded to itself, the main weakness exploited were the users of the system. For example there a number of settings that the Luftwaffe left up to the operator for messages that were supposed to be random but Bletchley Park found some operators that used the same settings everyday until the end of the war. Some operators would broadcast the same

Bletchley Park is getting more attention in recent years. I've been there, but before the restored Colossus or replica bombe was working. All we saw were static exhibits, plus a working Enigma, something I'd seen before. There were few visitors.

Now they have funding from the UK national lottery [bletchleypark.org.uk], "Family Fun Wednesdays", a conference center, a giant chessboard, a model railway (with a "Thomas the Tank Engine layout), a mini cinema, an auto museum, model boats, and swans in the lake.

In that case a revisit is worthwhile. Much has changed in the past few years, with new exhibition spaces becoming available, the Colossus and bombe, and all the other stuff you mention. Try and plan your visit on a day that the National Museum of Computing (on the same grounds, but operated independently with rather limited opening hours) is also open.

That is great. What I feel sad about is that the US didn't perserve the most important ship of WWII which was the USS Enterprise. We kept of bunch of old battleships from that time like the Texas and Alabama but we scrapped the Enterprise.

Station X at Bletchley Park is an important part of our shared history... It marks the beginning of the all electronic digital computing and also of distributed computing (they had up to 10 Collosus working across different locations, by the end of the war). Much groundwork theory was built in that era by people working at that place, including the ideas behind of packet switched data networks and routed networks.

I visited back in 2005 and I hope to go again someday (when I am in the UK).

Unfortunately, the people in charge failed to notice a good thing when they saw it and kept a good deal of it secret, leaving others to take computing forward. Similar story with what would become known as RSA.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that without Alan Turing, Europe as we know it might not exist.

Ftfy.Cracking the Enigma code was a huge deal, and may have made the difference between the outcome seen in history (a terrible war, but one that Nazis eventually lost) and a horrific alternative with a crippling invasion of England and failure of many of the Allied powers' anti-Nazi offensives. Even a delay in the cracking could have been disastrous. It's possible that the Bletchley team would have cr

It's a good point. There's another story that makes a compelling case for a single event / group that won the war (not that the two stories are mutually exclusive). Told in the book "A Man Called Intrepid" the basic concept was that the pre-OSS crew got Hitler and the Nazi leadership all fired up about how America didn't take them seriously, via intentionally intercepted mail, so that when Japan declared war on the US, Hitler did too b/c he wanted to show the US how powerful he was (what other reason, beyon